A cylindrically polarized light beam, and including a hybrid-azimuthal and a radial hybrid polarization beam as well as radial and azimuthal polarization beams generated from an input linearly polarized Gaussian beam using a spun optical waveguide device called HARP modes.
Light beams having optical vortices are desirable for a number of important applications. These applications include, for example, optical imaging, lithography, electron particle acceleration, material processing, efficient laser cutting, welding, and metrology. Further, radially and azimuthally polarized light enables the focusing of beams beyond the diffraction limit while generating stationary longitudinal electric and magnetic fields.
The radially and/or azimuthally polarized light beams, referred to as cylindrical vector beams, may be generated using several different methods including, for example, intra-cavity polarization manipulation, computer generated holograms, offset input to few-mode optical fibers, and excitation of optical fibers with higher order modes. For applications like optical trapping, the radial polarized beam is able to trap the ambient medium, while the azimuthally polarized beam works to trap particles with dielectric constants lower than the ambient medium. Switching between radial and azimuthal polarization can be done, for example by using two half-wave plates.
While these methods have been devised to generate vector beams, these methods are complicated for they involve using few mode fibers in conjunction with a number of micro optic components such as an asymmetric phase plate, half wave plates and polarization controllers. For example, one would first convert an input Gaussian beam to an asymmetric beam using a phase plate and then use a number of polarization components to enable conversion to a cylindrical polarization mode.
It is well known that spinning an optical fiber can cause coupling between the two linear polarization modes of the first spatial mode of an optical fiber, i.e. the LP01 mode. See, for example, A. J. Barlow et. al. Applied Optics 20, 2961, (1981); U.S. Pat. No. 5,298,047; and M. J. Li and D A. Nolan Optics Letters, Vol. 23, No. 21, pgs. 1659-1661, (1998). These spinning techniques and technologies have been well studied for the purpose of reducing polarization mode dispersion in long length optical fiber transmission lines.